Food and the City: Urban Agriculture and the New Food Revolution (13 page)

No space was wasted. And no culinary experiment, it seemed, was out of the question. Ridsdill Smith lamented that his wasabi, a Japanese horseradish, was struggling, but the daikon radishes that the women from London's legendary Coriander Club (a Bengalese women's community garden that is part of the Spitalfields City Farm in London) suggested he grow were flourishing.

Ridsdill Smith's living room had become a plant nursery. Now that his son was old enough, a diaper-changing table had even become a multi-tiered lettuce nursery. The windowsills that faced the street were crammed with window boxes of herbs, tumbler tomatoes, salad greens, kale, peppers, and newly planted cilantro, just past the two-leaf stage. The same was true for the bedroom windowsills: zucchini, radish sprouts, tomatoes, and peppers. I half-jokingly mentioned that the window boxes looked heavy. Falling window boxes, toppled by a bumper crop of tomatoes, were a real possibility, he replied. He pointed out his extra staking and ties to prevent any disasters. He had also been experimenting with a “Canadian invention,” which he'd learned about on the Internet. The window boxes were actually two planters, one set inside the other, double boiler-style; the water in the bottom box would draw up into the soil in the inner box via osmosis. This kept the soil's nutrients from washing out of the soil as they tend to do when watering takes place from above.

Ridsdill Smith was modest about his impressive balcony-based food production. Truly, he made it all look so easy. He then handed me a bag of incredible salad greens. The Thai coriander would end up scenting my shoulder bag for the next few days, but the windowsill produce was eaten that day in my newly acquired addiction to “ploughman's lunch”—the iconic British sandwiches of sharp, hard cheese; relish; fresh or pickled vegetables; and sliced onions for which I had acquired a fondness relatively quickly.

Soon after the tour of his impressive gardens, Ridsdill Smith, Clare Gilbert, and I made our way to a new food-growing space Ridsdill Smith had helped with—a first of its kind in the United Kingdom—a grocery store with a rooftop veggie garden in nearby Crouch End in the London borough of Haringey.

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OOD FROM THE
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KY

Crouch End, with its white-accented brickwork townhomes and picturesque 1895-built clock tower, looks like a life-sized gingerbread village. I was grateful that Ridsdill Smith was navigating to the store with the mouthful of a name, Thornton's Budgens of Crouch End.

Thornton's Budgens are well-known grocery stores throughout the United Kingdom. They are smallish, niche grocery franchises where each store has some leeway to specialize in local fresh foods tailored to its customer base. Thornton's Budgens of Crouch End, owned by charismatic Irishman Andrew Thornton, had recently made the food pages as the first Thornton's Budgens in the chain to sell gray squirrel. (The United Kingdom was still undecided at the time as to whether the resurgence of gray squirrel as a meat option was the latest in sustainable locavore eating or a stomach-churning animal rights travesty. Crouch End apparently had a pro-squirrel-meat consumer base: a July 2010 article that appeared in the
Guardian
newspaper reported that Thornton's Budgens’ Crouch End store was selling “10 to 15 a week” when they could keep it in stock.
¹⁸
)

Ridsdill Smith and I weren't there for the squirrel meat or even the retail experience, however. We were there to see “the world's first supermarket roof garden.”
¹⁹
Ridsdill Smith had been one of the twenty volunteers who transformed a supermarket's flat roof into a 4,800-square-foot (450-square-meter) food garden in the spring of 2010, complete with scarecrows, Tibetan prayer flags, and a hammock.

As we arrived up on the rooftop, Food from the Sky's creator, Azul-Valérie Thomé, was squatting on a low stool, rubbing mustard greens seeds out of dried pods of a row that had been left to seed. It was a “seed day,” according to the biodynamic calendar, she told me, extending her hand, with a playful acrylic ladybug ring on it, to greet me.

Thomé told me that she had been “studying Steiner,” referencing Rudolph Steiner, the father of biodynamic agricultural practices, for some time.
²⁰
Biodynamic food growing is an organic, holistic approach to farming and food production, incorporating celestial calendar days for optimal seeding, transplanting, and harvesting. While it seems a bit mystical, I've learned not to dismiss biodynamics’ seemingly kooky concepts, because I'm most often incredibly impressed by its healthy crops and tasty results.

After living on a fifty-acre organic farm in the county of Devon in southwest England for fifteen years, Thomé arrived in London with “this vision of wanting to cover all the flat roofs with orchards and strawberries,” she explained as she continued to hull seeds, her accent a seductive layering of British over French. Thomé informed me that there are about one hundred square kilometers, or one billion square feet, of roof space in the city. Shortly after arriving in London, she met Thornton. “He said, ‘I have a roof. Want to come up and see it?’” And Food from the Sky was born in spring 2010.

Ridsdill Smith gamely took over seed collecting as Thomé walked me around the rooftop farm. Some of the seeds, Thomé explained, would be given away free or donated to local community groups or individuals. Some would be saved for future plantings. Some would be “returned” to the Heritage Seed Library, a UK-based “lending library” that provides various endangered seeds, mostly European varieties, that have fallen out of favor with commercial seed companies or that were never available in commercial catalogs to begin with. Food from the Sky was playing its part by keeping these rare vegetable variety seeds in the hands of growers, to keep the biodiversity and community food resilience from further erosion, and as a way to help build up community
reserves of these open-pollinator seeds—plants that pollinate in the wind or that exist thanks to visits from bees or other flower-loving insects—for future generations.

Rather than spreading soil over the roof (which generally means some expensive weight-bearing assessments, reengineering, drainage installation, and waterproofing), hundreds of plastic recycling bins were donated by the Haringey council, and ten tons of LondonWaste—organic compost that London collects as household kitchen and garden waste, composts, and then redistributes to backyard gardeners, allotment owners, and anyone looking for growing medium—was delivered to the roof. (The city's household green-waste collection program diverts 45,000 metric tons (49,604 tons) of organic waste away from landfills every year.
²¹
Methane is a gas that is 21 percent more harmful environmentally than carbon dioxide; therefore, diverting large amounts of compostable matter plays a huge role in sustainable urban planning.)

Thomé then coordinated volunteers to plant, transplant, nurture, and harvest the variety of crops that grow astonishingly well in their plastic recycling bins. Thomé excitedly pulled a baseball-sized Bull's Blood beetroot for me to photograph. It was growing happily in a recycling container next to a fig tree that sported several small figs dangling from the thin branches. A straw-mat vertical fence offered protection to the row of tomato vines and arugula, radish, and various other seeds that were being sprouted in repurposed cardboard egg cartons.

I remarked on the abundance of bees working the flowers. Their buzz was audible even above the street noise. Thomé said that the bees arrived just one week after the first blossoms appeared on the plants. One of her volunteers has identified up to thirty different insects on the roof. Pollinators like bumblebees, honeybees, butterflies, and solitary bees clearly enjoyed the buffet of pollens at their disposal. But spiders, flies, and worms were also noted as a sign of a healthy ecosystem. “It was dead a few months ago, a very desolate urban area. Life has come. They've moved in,” Thomé boasted, letting out a throaty laugh.

Seed gathering gave way to harvesting, cleaning, and packaging romaine heads. (By the time I left, crisp bullets of romaine hearts from the roof were on sale in the special display island at the front of the store.) Depending on the season that summer, Crouch End customers had been able to purchase salad greens, arugula, choy, cress, big black radishes for the winter, purple broccoli, borage (a culinary and medicinal
herb with star-shaped blue, white, or pink blossoms), tomatoes, parsley, beets, carrots, and sorrel (a perennial leafy herb for soups and salads), just hours after they had been picked.

Despite her products getting premium prices thanks to the quality and freshness, Thomé noted that the income required to keep Food from the Sky operational could not come only from food sales. Workshops and educational visits “giving opportunity to children and older people to show them how to grow food in their homes and how to increase urban biodiversity” were part of the plan. Then she flashed a smile and said, “Biodiversity includes humans too, you know.” Food from the Sky had a higher purpose than providing ultra-fresh lettuces and vegetables to affluent Crouch End gourmands. “Between permaculture and biodynamics, we feel that we are connecting the whole of life, of creation really, in 450 square meters. This is an amazing opportunity. Not only just to grow food, but to create a template of what's possible on a roof.”
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F
ROM
U
RBAN
B
LIGHT TO
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RBAN
W
INE

When I mentioned to friends who had lived in London at one point or another that a commercial vineyard had been planted in King's Cross in 2009, there were two reactions: confusion and disgust. (King's Cross's reputation for being a gritty, postindustrial, and particularly unsavory part of central London won't last long though. It's undergoing a massive revitalization.) The thought of British wine alone was unthinkable, they told me. But London wine? Absolutely, if novelty counts for more than drinkability. London has had an underground urban wine movement for a couple of years, and I was determined to see its first commercial winery for myself.

My enthusiasm was slipping into foreboding, however, as I made my way up Camley Street from the King's Cross Underground subway station. The area was one giant construction site, and apart from the
sparkling new St. Pancras Eurostar Chunnel train station, King's Cross had a long way to go toward the promise of urban renewal. About twenty minutes along, I finally reached a mixed residential-industrial neighborhood, where I was hoping that I wasn't searching in vain for a vineyard.

By this point in my urban-agriculture adventures, I had learned to keep an open mind. The location rarely resembled any of my preconceptions. In this case, the vineyard, as it would turn out, would be tucked around the back of the two-story Alara Wholefoods warehouse building.

Dressed in a slate-gray suit with a claret-colored tie, Alara owner Alex Smith looked less like a vintner and more like a CEO. But as we walked and toured his “dream farm,” as he calls it, I began to see that he was not your average business owner and that this was not your average warehouse head office.

Rather than heading to the “vineyard” right away, Smith wanted to show off his food gardens. More specifically, we started at his garden's toolshed/
cave de vin
, a canary-yellow repurposed shipping container at the edge of a garden pathway. Truthfully, it
had
been a long, taxing walk from the train station to Alara, so when Smith offered me a taste of his estate elderflower “champagne,” I didn't say no.

It was tart, sharp, and refreshing, almost grapefruity. We were literally standing under the canopy of the century-old elderberry tree whose small white spring flowers and wild yeasts made that tipple. Well, I thought, if you can make a drinkable sparkler from an old tree on an industrial site, maybe there is a vineyard hidden somewhere here. We sipped from our flutes as Smith told me the story of how he came to be London's first commercial vintner.

Alex Smith came to central London to study architecture in the early 1970s.
²³
He quickly became alarmed at the indecent profits that developers were making off of certain areas of London, while many were finding that the cost of living in the city meant squeezing more and more people into poverty. Smith became concerned with the fate of Tolmers
Square, an early-Victorian landmark at the north end of Tottenham Court Road, a major commercial road in central London. Tolmers Square was next on the redevelopment auction block, and shell companies were in the habit of buying up property, intentionally vandalizing them to make them unlivable, and then turning them into huge redevelopment properties. When one of these intentionally derelicted properties crumbled, killing two pedestrians on the sidewalk, Smith decided that he had to take a stand.

“There I was studying architecture and this sort of thing was going on in the profession I wanted to go into,” Smith explained as we nursed our flutes of sparkling elderberry.
²⁴
Smith despaired both at the disregard for safety and at the thought of the vandalism to a beautiful historic square just in the name of profit. “The only way I could really properly morally oppose it was to live there without money,” Smith said, referring to his decision to become an illegal squatter in this area slated for redevelopment. He also began a year of living entirely without money. (When he received a £5 note as a birthday gift that year, he used it to start a fire for warmth.)